BLIND ALLEYS
A doctrine that justifies democracy is the idea that all humans are equal, one of our most basic concepts. But we know that people are unequal. Some are smart. Some are good-looking. Some have more money or education than others. You’re not supposed to think the thoughts that follow.
Flat factual equality is fantasy that leads to problems like thinking that fairness is a matter of equal time, or that shutting down destructive individuals or groups must be elaborately justified. Both Biden and Obama are criticized for trying to be bipartisan and so compromising, which means a loss of power. They take a knife to a gunfight, forgetting how little skill it takes to pull a trigger. They try not to stigmatize or prejudge, so are easy targets. Few talk about intransigence that paralyzes us or can think about how to end it.
Another problem is the construction of hierarchies and defining the “best” as something to which everyone should aspire. We should all “go to Harvard”, though that edifice is definitely showing cracks in its facade. Common denominators can be mistaken or encourage rot, unchallenged. We deny the importance of excellence in quotidian work like infrastructure.
We gentle democrats/liberals/intellectuals have no defenses against ruthlessness, particularly that which doesn’t just come from greed or revenge, but from an emptiness where morality should be. It may be trauma damage, otherwise simply organic, missing system parts, or lacking experience.
Over-idealism and the need to “be” a good person can be praiseworthy but not support survival. (Stubbornness creates sacrificed saints.) Good will can amount to denial and blindness. Inequality is not necessarily bad, though it is often the source of bad dynamics. To understand how to oppose and hopefully end bad dynamics, one needs more than good will, like time and empathy with people who have none. How do you do that?
Virtue by affiliation, sometimes called “virtue signalling”, needs to be ended. Single acts of virtue can be doubted because each act is subject to dependence on the circumstances and whom they benefit. Being a member of an identified group with a good reputation (Quakers? Native Americans?) may amount to cover for bad behavior in individuals.
Demographics and silos only mean what they are interpreted to mean. It’s deeply disturbing to many people that the rioters who attacked the Capitol were not rabble, nor losers, nor victims of stigma, but rather white middle-class and presumably law-abiding enforcers who were filled with some kind of overweening conviction about “knowing better” than others. Their “superiority” will be challenged in court cases.
Even more disturbing is the abysmal quality of our elected representatives revealed by hearings to be empty show-boats and not even appealing as personalities. Some are plainly unfit and others are more devious, revealed by a different kind of modern technology: data and emails that persist or were ignored out of ignorance. Their evil comes from not-knowing, not living in the same world as the rest of us even as they purport to serve us.
This isn’t new and its not even far from home — I see it in the small actions in the small towns where I’ve lived. They compartment, saying, “Well, this is business and business is different. It’s a matter of survival. Everyone does it. If you don’t, you’ll fail.” They mean chiseling on the regulations, “adjusting” figures, omitting elements, forming collaborating networks, denial. They say, “Oh, the taxation laws allow for cheaters, so it’s okay — it’s expected.”
For me one demographic considered an illegal and immoral subgroup that never goes away for some reason — has turned out to be a source of insight and strategy — not despite, but because of connecting to members via subversive means: email and blogging rather than participation. They are a demographic group that was separated from convention by the need to survive through any means. So many now exist because of the contemporary failure of families to form or persist, drugs, global mobility, changing standards and techniques of sexual interaction, food shortage, medical exploitation. Some were simply anatomical anomalies, gender role anomalies, and some had problematic temperaments. I speak of stigmatized sex workers.
The first surprise was that they are not monolithic. Media likes social outcasts grouped and labeled for purposes of description and promotion — selling something. But not everyone is a Robin Williams character flaunting a feather boa and not everyone is Leonard Bernstein. Now and then someone notorious surfaces, but in fact there are always systems of like-minded people who seem conventional but connect under the radar.
For instance, I’m aware that in the SW there have been and might still be groups serving indigenous children, headed by men who are gay and even funded by wealthy gays. Despite using the notorious pattern of religious residential schools and sometimes being accused of trafficking, they quietly keep kids alive and fed in a way the government seems unwilling to do. Studies suggest that gays have a special concern for children and are not infertile. Nor are they pedophiles. They simply have a drive to provide.
When “Embodiment” philosophy became valorized as a point of view, it was the sexually fluid who had experience and knowledge of “other” bodies in a way that European Enlightenment had forbidden or forced into medicalization. As we move through our present “Deconstruction”, they have ways to tell “straights” what we didn’t know.
I was startled when I quipped that I was too old to employ sex workers and got an answer from a professional: “I can give anyone physical pleasure. You’re never too old to have skin.”
Gays confronting HIV, some of them veterans of the SF epidemic, have a lot to tell us about how to survive and how to help each other. They know first hand about medical exploitation and grudging government support. Those who are sex workers know a great deal about “tricks”, their psychological makeup and how to use it. Sometimes they started figuring this out as children dealing with relatives, maybe fathers — learning to divert, to postpone, to displace, to recognize signs of impending violence.
Apparently it is spontaneous Emergence in a mathematical sense when a particular way of being reaches some critical mass and is ready to stand against the previous majority. But this terrifies those who had grown accustomed to the old order. Now that people live so long, the problem is expanded. One way to address the fear is through testimonial stories. Those who have endured and escaped stigma have a lot to tell us, but observers from just outside the circle can be valuable, sometimes escaping the constraints of the main body of the subgroup, like family or gay political groups. These divergents can be the future order and salvation.
These reflections are bound to be misunderstood, even by myself from one day to another, because it is feeling around in the dark so far. What else can we do until the lights go on?
